Brown — Assembling a Black Counter Culture

Author: DeForrest Brown, Jr.
Title: Assembling a Black Counter Culture
Year: 2022
Type: Book (Primary Information)

Assembling a Black Counter Culture is a book by the writer and electronic musician DeForrest Brown, Jr., published by Primary Information in August 2022. Its publisher presents it as a history of techno focused on Black experiences in industrialized labor systems, repositioning the genre as a form of Black musical and cultural production and reframing it from a Black theoretical perspective, distinct from its absorption into predominantly white European electronic music. The book traces techno’s origins in 1980s Detroit back through the slave trade, Emancipation and the Great Migration, then follows the Belleville Three, Underground Resistance and Drexciya and the networks that carried techno to other cities, with references to the autoworker and activist James Boggs, Alvin Toffler’s “techno rebels” and Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture. Nicholas Nauman, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, credited it with a crucial intervention in the history of Black ingenuity while finding its form difficult, and Joe Muggs, in The Wire, wrote that its critiques deserve to be answered.

Brown is an Alabama-raised writer who records as Speaker Music and represents the Make Techno Black Again campaign. Primary Information published the book, his first, on August 23, 2022.^{1, 2} The publisher presents it as a history of techno focused on Black experiences in industrialized labor systems, “repositioning the genre as a unique form of Black musical and cultural production.”¹ It describes the book as a reframing of techno from a Black theoretical perspective, distinct from the music’s absorption into predominantly white, European electronic music.¹ The book locates techno’s origins in 1980s Detroit and traces them back through the transatlantic slave trade, Emancipation, the Industrial Revolution and the Great Migration of Black Southerners to the industrial cities of the North, where an African American working class formed.¹ It then follows the work of the Belleville Three, Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson, and of Underground Resistance and Drexciya, and the networks that carried techno from Detroit to other cities.^{1, 3} It links Black electronic music to Afrofuturist and Afrodiasporic practices, with references to the writings of the autoworker and activist James Boggs, Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture and the “techno rebels” of Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave.¹

Nicholas Nauman, reviewing the book in the Los Angeles Review of Books in April 2023, summarized its premise as the assertion that “techno is part of the centuries-long tradition of Black practices that reject the terms of white history,” and wrote that it was “poised to make a crucial intervention in the historicization of Black ingenuity and survival.” He also found its form difficult, with long stretches of block quotation in place of paragraphs and theories summarized without being argued toward new concepts.⁴ Joe Muggs, in The Wire, wrote that the book “deserves to be very widely read” and that its critiques deserve to be answered.²

Key contributions

• Techno as a form of Black musical and cultural production, with a history traced from slavery through industrial labor to the Detroit music of the 1980s.
• Techno read through the history of Black experiences in industrialized labor systems, with references to James Boggs, Alvin Toffler and Theodore Roszak.
• A history of techno’s networks from the Belleville Three, Underground Resistance and Drexciya to cities outside Detroit.

See also

• Ocean of Sound — David Toop’s 1995 history of ambient music
• Energy Flash — Simon Reynolds’s 1998 history of rave
• Pink Noises — Tara Rodgers’s 2010 interviews with women in electronic music
• Electronic — the genre family
• Dance — the genre family